Over the course of the last three months or so, Ryan has more or less taught himself how to read. He’s not even in the kindergarten class at school yet, so the teachers haven’t been directly helping him with it, and Michelle and I have been more focused on physical activity and fine motor skills. (Okay, so that’s code for ‘we let him play outside and on the computer;’ I’ve got enough parent guilt already, thank you.) He’s recognized his name for a long time — since he was just older than two — and various other short words have crept in here and there, like “STOP” on a stop sign, “GO!” from one of the computer games he plays (he used to spell that word “G-O-exclamation point”), “OFF” from light switches, that sort of thing.
But in the last few months, he’s really just powered through, and gotten to the point where he’s really reading. He can sound out unfamiliar words, getting the sounds wrong only sometimes (mostly vowels, because English can be tricky like that), and once he’s seen a really unfamiliar word that appears more than once in a story, he can recall it for the rest of the story without trouble, and can remember it the next time he reads the book. His current favorite book is about a caterpillar who spins a cocoon and who at one points eats a salami, and although some of those words gave him trouble on the first read, he doesn’t even hesitate on them anymore.
Even letter combinations I’d classify as ‘really tricky’ no longer trip him up. I taught him how the gh in night doesn’t make any sound (“N-I says nye, G-H says <mouth open without saying anything>, T says tuh, so N-I-G-H-T says nye, <pause>, tuh. Night.”), and he immediately picked up on the obvious words like fight, right, and sight — but it was still startling to see him not trip over bought, only making the slight mistake of pronouncing it like boat.
It’s not just reading comprehension, either, it’s also spelling. He can take a word he’s never heard before and pretty quickly guess at how it’s spelled, which amazes me when you give him a word like amaze and he comes back with A-M-A-Z. And he can do the reverse, and he can take a string of letters spoken out loud and turn them into words, which startled Michelle and I when we were talking about having I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M, and Ryan said “I want ice cream too!”
(Of course, being a child of the Internet Age, he also makes some pattern-matching mistakes when sounding out words; his initial attempt at saying the letters in the word welcome resulted in “W-E-L-dot com-E”.)
All of the above is just to give a little more insight into what happened yesterday. The whole family was outside; Michelle was cleaning the big dog’s ears, I was just hanging around, Ryan and Alyssa were alternately chasing and being chased by the little dog. When I went inside to clean up from dinner, Ryan followed me, initially to ask me how I came inside (he’s got ‘how’ and ‘why’ confused a little right now), but then he helped a bit and dawdled in the kitchen.
Not too long after that, the microwave switched on. I whirled around to see Ryan standing right next to the microwave, his eyes wide and his finger still hovering near the buttons. He didn’t say anything, which is pure Ryan (Alyssa would have said “I didn’t do it!” almost immediately), just stood there with a cross between a mischevious grin and abject horror on his face.
More laughing than angry, I crossed the kitchen and turned off the microwave. ”Ryan,” I asked, “what on Earth are you doing?”
“I was wanted some popcorn,” he said.
I got what I’d imagine is that look of utter bewilderment that I get when my son says something that is perfectly reasonable and still makes no sense. I didn’t know what to say, so I just said, “What?”
He points at the microwave, where there is a button I have never seen that says POPCORN. ”Popcorn, dad.” He says this in that patronizing tone he gets sometimes, as if I’m a bumbling but lovable buffoon.
After a moment, I laugh. ”I’ll get you some popcorn later, Mister Guy. Don’t play with the microwave, ok?”
He says “Okay!” and then he’s off playing outside again.